The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Many existing vendors offer software that creates and displays images, including the display of color or grayscale images that appear to be three dimensional. In the field of medical imaging, these images are typically based on data describing a volume of material or human tissue. Devices such as CT, MRI, PET, and Ultrasound can generate data describing a volume of human or animal tissue. Caregivers may display these volumes in a manner such that one or more images appear to be three dimensional using techniques such as volume rendering and surface shading. In addition, such software many enable the user to perform multi-planar reconstructions, maximum intensity pixel displays, or display grayscale or color slabs of various thickness and orientations.
Medical images are typically viewed by radiologists and other physicians, patients, and/or others by interaction with desktop computer systems with stationary monitors. Interaction with images in such systems is typically by keyboard and/or mouse input. For example, the reviewing physician may move from one image to the next by pressing an arrow key, movement of the mouse, or movement of the scroll wheel. Such systems are not ideal for at least two reasons. First, medical images may be very large and include significant detail (for example, be very high resolution). Zooming into and scrolling around such images using a keyboard and mouse may be cumbersome, time consuming, and inefficient. Second, medical images are frequently part of a large series of images, or generated from a large amount of three dimensional image data. Moving through such series of images and/or three dimensional image data using a keyboard and mouse may also be cumbersome, time consuming, and inefficient. Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets may be used to display images, but the difficulties associated with viewing large images and series of images using desktop monitors are made worse by the much smaller size of the displays associated with mobile devices.